


The Fifth

by Saladscream



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Challenge Response, First Time, M/M, Manip, Season Five-ish, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 19:42:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8298061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saladscream/pseuds/Saladscream
Summary: Daniel discovers what happens after the fourth cigarette.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a response to a little private challenge we had, Pepe and I. The Smoking-Hot Challenge: 5 smoking!Daniel manips inspiring 5 fics in 5 days. 
> 
> **Warning**: Suspend your disbelief! Smoking here is just sexy. It magically doesn’t cause cancer, yellow teeth, or stinky coyote breath. If you don’t like the idea of Daniel smoking, then do us both a favour and don’t read this. 
> 
> My apologies to all the smokers and non-smokers out there.
> 
> A thousand thanks to Pepe for the ever-insightful beta. All remaining mistakes are *mine*!
> 
>  
> 
> **The artwork is mine: *please* no reposting or re-using without my consent.**

Daniel shook the lighter again, uselessly. Damn these things: the cheap flint wheel was jammed. Served him right for never buying a proper lighter.

But then, Daniel kept losing lighters.

He’d probably lost at least half a dozen in each seedy motel in the area.

Daniel looked around. A few feet away, a bunch of twenty-somethings were hanging out on the sidewalk, heads bopping to the muffled beat coming from inside the club.

“Excuse me,” he called one of them who happened to look his way. “Have you got a light?” He raised his hand to show the unlit cigarette at the tip of his fingers.

The kid didn’t answer but came his way, still engaged in the conversation with his friends. He gave Daniel his cigarette to serve as a lighter.

Tall, gangly, with sandy blond hair and pale eyes – too thin to be strong and way too young for Daniel to even consider checking him out.

“Thanks,” Daniel said with a nod when he was done.

The kid joined his friends with barely a backwards glance, which was just as well. What was it with all the kids out tonight? Was it the first day of the summer vacations or something? Daniel tried to figure out the date. He could have sworn today was a Friday, but he couldn’t remember the date. He knew that on Monday they were bound for PZX-4523, and the report he’d read this morning said it would be the 16th, so that made today… Friday 13th. Great.

Daniel dragged thoughtfully on his cigarette, wondering if there was a point to tonight’s effort. The smoke prickled lazily in his lungs and the nicotine slow-burned in his brain. With his favourite haunt raided by kids, his chances of finding what he was looking for were slim.

He sighed a wisp of smoke.

He should call it a night and go home. Damn, he wished he hadn’t lit the cigarette now, because the way his reptilian brain had come to associate cigarettes with sex made abstinence just that little bit more frustrating. And given the indecently low average age of the so-called men on the prowl tonight, sex was most definitely not on the menu for Daniel and his chronic case of blue balls.

He pulled the half-empty pack out of his jacket pocket and slid the useless lighter in it. He could easily do without the cigarettes but he wondered if he could do without sex. Especially now that he was having his fourth cigarette. He was usually on his way to the nearest motel room with the most eligible random guy in the club by the third one.

It was funny the unexpected place smoking had taken in his life. It had never been an addiction for him: a half-pack a month at most could hardly be called that. If he had to qualify it, he’d say smoking was a useful social tool.

At first, it had been a means to an end. A baiting accessory. Cigarettes and lighters were the ultimate ice-breakers. Had been so since college. The quickest, simplest way to start a conversation with a stranger – or to allow a stranger to start a conversation. Even if said stranger was a non-smoker. It was all Daniel needed: an easy excuse to address someone or be addressed. The rest he could spin and weave on his own. He was a smooth talker once he had the right audience.

Besides, to be fair, no one was in it for the conversation.

Something had always fascinated him about cigarettes, though. It was all the non-verbal communication he could do with them. The artful gestures and poses. The pursing of lips. The position of his hand. The puffs of smoke themselves. There was a whole range of things he could express in the way he held the frail object. Desire, tension, sadness – obscene availability. He could pretend he was someone else and wrap himself in complete, fictive mystery, or conversely and on rarer occasions, he could bare his very soul and expose his needs. It amounted to the same thing really: no one here would ever be able to tell the difference. In any case, Daniel had realized that the way he held and smoked his cigarettes could let the guy know exactly what he was after.

So cigarettes had become part of his cruising night ritual. The necessary prop. The lucky charm.

But then, more insidiously, cigarettes had become a scale with which he rated his own attractiveness.

If he scored after one cigarette, it meant he was looking good. Two cigarettes was the average mark. Three cigarettes and he was probably tired. Four cigarettes meant he’d had a bad week at the Mountain and he was coming across as pushy, needy, geeky, broken or all of the above. Five cigarettes were… well, he’d never had to wait five cigarettes, so far. He tried hard not to think what five cigarettes would mean. He’d probably quit smoking altogether if it ever took him five cigarettes to land a guy.

Daniel blew out his last lungful of smoke and grimly stubbed out his fourth cigarette against the concrete wall before flicking it onto the street.

Okay, so tonight was one of _those_ nights.

He had crossed the four-cigarette line now and the sidewalks were teeming with youngsters that made him feel like a creepy old perv.

A self-loving hand in the comfort of his own bed felt like the safe way to go.

Disappointing, but safe.

And that, incidentally, was pretty much how one could describe his sexual life anyway.

Daniel pushed away from the wall he’d been propping up for some time now. Home was a prospect that became more appealing with each passing second. It wasn’t like anyone would miss him in the club. He slowly headed back to his car, parked a few streets away.

His thoughts strayed on the way.

He wondered how long he would keep this up. How long he would continue this little charade that had become his private life. More glumly, he wondered how long he still had to live in this drab world.

If only he were doing another job. One that didn’t build up so much tension and fear and aggressive adrenaline in every drop of his blood. One that didn’t mean he was facing danger and pain and loss on a daily basis. He was an archaeologist, for God’s sake. There was only so much excitement a four-eyed dweeb could stand.

To be honest, though, it wasn’t the job so much as Jack that built up tension in him these days.

Jack and his increasingly snide attitude. Jack and his “shoot first ask questions later” brand of exploration. Jack and his odiously convenient flirting with Sam.

Jack and his sexual presence that Daniel was helpless to ignore.

And damn it, he itched for one last cigarette before hitting the road back to Colorado Springs now. The last cigarette of the evening – the one that should have been a post-coital smoke.

The one that would now effectively be the fifth cigarette.

He pulled out the pack as he approached his car. Retrieved the plastic lighter. Tapped a cigarette out. Brought it to his lips. Cupped his hands and hunched against the draught… only to remember the lighter didn’t work.

He tried nonetheless, and cursed after the fourth fruitless attempt.

Out of nowhere a Zippo appeared. The hand holding it struck up a flame for him. Daniel grilled the tip and gratefully pulled on his cigarette. He was about to thank the good Samaritan when he felt his heart suddenly sink as his brain finally caught up with what he was seeing.

He knew that Zippo. And he knew that hand.

The Zippo had a very specific Air Force unit crest on it and its battered twin was in Skaara’s possession.

And the hand… the hand was the one Daniel had always thought he could rely on to provide distraction, help, solace and protection, whatever the situation – until about two years ago, when it had been imperceptibly withdrawn.

Daniel’s mind raced to go through the list of incriminating evidence against him. He was in a dubious neighbourhood, wearing clothes that were rather on the fuck-me side of smart casual, and indulging in a dirty habit his friends and team-mates had probably never suspected him of. 

And he was smoking.

He sighed out the smoke he’d been withholding and turned to face his fate.

“Evening, Jack,” he said quietly.

“Daniel.”

“Busted?”

“Pretty much,” Jack nodded and assumed that bored air he always took when he was threat-assessing the shit out of a situation.

Daniel almost felt like smiling. It was kind of flattering to warrant the same treatment Jack usually reserved for enemies.

“How long?” Jack asked, as if that mattered in the least.

Daniel looked numbly at the cigarette gracing his hand.

“Uh, college. On and off.”

“I wasn’t talking about the smoking habit.”

“Oh.” Oh, so he really _was_ busted, wasn’t he? “Same answer, I guess,” he said, adrenaline suddenly pumping through his veins and making every muscle and nerve in his body quiver and tingle with new, reckless energy.

“You’re good at hiding,” Jack praised as a connoisseur, apparently making a mental note of it.

And Daniel couldn’t hold back the spunky answer.

“I’m good at a lot of things,” he stated, cocking his head to the side just a fraction and levelling an unambiguous look at the bane of his existence.

Jack’s his lips quirked cryptically at that.

With deliberate precision, Daniel then took a slow drag from his cigarette, earning Jack’s undivided attention. He let the butt linger close to his lips long after he’d finished inhaling. His lungs prickled lazily with smoke as he contemplated the deadly game of roulette he was playing. With great care, he released a gentle puff of smoke. Not too much in Jack’s face.

“Ready to put your money where your mouth is?” Jack asked, a dark challenge in his voice.

“Are you?” Daniel said by way of answer.

“I don’t usually go with smokers, but I’m ready to make an exception.” Jack didn’t look bored anymore. He looked focussed and smooth and predatory. A pleasant shiver coursed down Daniel’s back.

Jack took the cigarette from Daniel’s hand – his fingers softly brushing over Daniel’s to steal their prize – and brought it to his lips.

Daniel realized Jack could do cigarette-speak, too.

The tip smouldered, a sultry promise in the enveloping gloom.

And Daniel already knew that, in the morning, he would throw away the half-empty pack. That he wouldn’t need it anymore, and he was okay with that... because it turned out that the fifth cigarette had landed him the only guy he’d ever wanted.

 

***The End***


End file.
